NowLondon

Architecture

Architecture in London

London builds on top of itself, and much of what stands went up on ground something else occupied first. Periods sit next to each other with little attempt to reconcile them.

• The Shard

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  Completed 2012

  Renzo Piano

  A tower over London Bridge station, tapering to a point. Renzo Piano set eight glass planes that lean inward but never meet, so the top breaks into fragments rather than closing off. The glass changes with the weather, which was the intent for a building visible from most of the city. The tower and the terminus beneath it were designed as one project.

• Tate Modern

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  Completed 2000

  Herzog & de Meuron

  A power station on the south bank turned into a museum of modern art. Herzog & de Meuron kept the brick shell and the turbine hall and added a glazed beam along the roof, changing as little as the programme allowed. The hall was left as one vast empty room rather than subdivided into galleries. Keeping that industrial scale instead of domesticating it is what the project argues.

• Lloyd's Building

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  Completed 1986

  Richard Rogers

  An insurance market in the City with its services on the outside. Richard Rogers put lifts, stairs, ducts and lavatory pods on the exterior so the trading floors could be cleared and rebuilt without touching them. Stainless steel covers the lot and the atrium runs the full height under a barrel vault. It is an argument that a building should be able to change, made in the most conservative quarter of London.

• Barbican Estate

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  Completed 1976

  Chamberlin, Powell and Bon

  A residential estate in the City with a concert hall, cinemas and a conservatory inside it. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon raised the walkways to a podium and finished the concrete by hand, hammering the surface to expose the aggregate. Towers, terraces and a lake sit in one plan, with the podium acting as the ground. It was conceived as a whole quarter rather than a group of buildings, on land cleared by wartime bombing.

• St Paul's Cathedral

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  Completed 1710

  Christopher Wren

  Christopher Wren's cathedral, built after the Great Fire took the medieval one. He wanted a dome where a spire was expected and solved it with three shells: an inner one sized for the room below, an outer one sized for the skyline, and a brick cone hidden between them carrying the lantern. The geometry is a compromise between two irreconcilable views of the same building. Wren spent more than thirty years on it, and the dome has been the city's fixed reference ever since.